On Wholphin, and other things McSweeney

I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but journals are no longer confined to the printed periodical. Shocking, yet true. Even in traditional publishing spheres, content production is being approached in pioneering ways.

The publishing house that immediately comes to mind – and I swear I’m not a McSweeney’s fanatic – is, well, McSweeney’s.

McSweeeny’s publish books, translated texts, the Voice of Witness series (a series of oral histories focusing on social justice), McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Believer and Wholphin.

Part of McSweeney’s raison d'être is an honest attempt to offer quality of content and production. And their innovation has payed off; how many publishing houses can claim that other endeavours have been funded by a quarterly journal for the past 11 years? (I don’t have the figures, but imagine it’s few.)

McSweeney’s is also creative when it comes to interacting with readers – on top of print and online. Clearly they have been thinking about the future of reading for some time. Their magazine The Believer has had an annual film issue and music issue, featuring a DVD and CD respectively, since its inception.

While this may not be entirely original, their quarterly journal Wholphin is. It’s also an example of how possibility for innovation in reading and presentation isn’t only found online. This quarterly arrives as a DVD, with an accompanying booklet that features printed interviews with the filmmakers, presumably to contextualise the work.

Wholphin is a quarterly DVD magazine published by McSweeney’s, lovingly encoded with unique and ponderable films designed to make you feel the way we felt when we learned that dolphins and whales sometimes, you know, do it.

Available immediately by subscription and distributed quarterly in the same places you’ll find McSweeney’s and The Believer, each issue of Wholphin will contain a variety of extraordinary short films, docs, instructional videos, foreign sitcoms, and other cinema hybrids that deserve to be seen on very expensive televisions.

It’s like a film festival in your mailbox every time one arrives. Or it would have been, if I hadn’t been subscribing to it for the past 3 years, but failing to watch it. It was only last week that I thought, ‘That’s an interesting collection on top of my bookshelf. Maybe I’ll have a closer look’. For shame.

I won’t go into details about what happens in all the films and documentaries, the details I bored my friends with on the weekend, instead, I’ll give you an example. This is an excerpt from Lauren Greenfield’s Kids + Money. It’s a documentary in which a group of mostly unrelated youths in Los Angeles frankly discuss the role money plays in their lives. The film is exceptional and should be watched in its entirety, but this is the last 7 mins or so:

Wholphin illustrates that inventiveness isn’t simply about the online multimedia vs static print pages dichotomy. If you’re an innovative publisher, there is much exploration to be had.

Interestingly in Melbourne, where I live, there are many literary journals but by and large they are targeting the same audiences, and producing similar publications, ie. a printed literary journal.

The newly arrived Paper Radio is an audio journal available wholly online. While there is no printed component, it shows another way of translating and producing content. The journal is divided into FM – ‘fiction, fantasy, speculation and other literary gymnastics’ – and AM – ‘non-fiction, documentary, social commentary and observation’. They were recently mentioned in the New Yorker, so their innovation is not geographically limited.

I think this bodes well for self-publishing, because if you can produce a quality product, in content and delivery, the world is your audience.

PS Forgot to say: Wholphin has many Web films, which you can watch online.